Comparing Five Music Players

There are so many choices of music players for Linux, it's hard to know which one will work best for you.

On modern computers, music players are as standard as word processors
and spreadsheets, but how do you choose one?
You can take for granted that music players using the same soundcard and speakers will produce roughly the same quality of sound. You
also can assume that any music player you try will be able to play
any music format that your operating system supports, including, for
GNU/Linux, the free Ogg Vorbis format. A modern music player will
support various sources as well, ranging from the local collection of tracks on
your hard drive to CDs, DVDs, external players and on-line sources, such
as Internet radio and podcasts. So, how do you decide?

To suggest an answer, I looked at five of the most popular music
players for GNOME and KDE—Amarok, Banshee, Exaile, Rhythmbox and
Songbird—using the current versions available in the Debian unstable
repository. After comparing them in each of six general usability categories, I ranked them and tallied the results.

Amarok

Banshee

Exaile

Rhythmbox

Songbird

Interface and Usability

Dragging and dropping tracks, desktop notifications and minimizing
music players to the notification tray are all standard features these
days. The differences in how each music player handles those features
are usually minor, although Amarok, like most current KDE apps, provides
the most customization for notifications. It also repurposes its middle
context pane when you are moving tracks from the media source pane on
the left to the playlist on the right by temporarily transforming it
into live links that you can drop selections on to get different results.

However, the largest problem for all these music players is how they
handle collections of local tracks and podcasts and music stores that
easily can number in the thousands these days. Unfortunately, in four out of
five cases, the handling of all this information is not well thought out.

The endless displays of tracks, albums, artists and playlists not only
make for a cluttered window, but also can leave users with a feeling that
they have too much information. At times, what controls actually do can
be difficult to discover, as with the filters for Rhythmbox's search
filter, which easily can be mistaken as controls for altering the panes
displayed in the window. Too often, the space for each column in a pane
is so limited and track or album names are so truncated in anything
less than a full-screen view, they almost might not be listed at all.

The exception to this rule is Amarok, whose three main panes maximize the
display space in the window while using every sort of trick—from expanded
trees to hiding music sources not currently in use—to reduce the clutter
and information overload. Exaile and Songbird manage some of the clutter
in their default views with tabs, but Banshee and Rhythmbox both have a
series of permanent panes that feel badly in need of cleanup. You can,
of course, greatly improve the layout of all the music players via the
View menu by selecting which panes or columns to display, but Amarok
remains far ahead in general appearance. If you really want to remove the
clutter, you can hide the middle context pane, reducing the information
in Amarok to a functional minimum. Another possibility is to undock one
or more of Amarok's panes to create a separate floating window that you
can refer to only as needed.

Still, all five players do what they can to help users navigate. All
can sort lists in ascending and descending order, and all include search
filters, although Amarok gives you more control over both sorting and
filters. In addition, Amarok and Banshee both offer bookmarks.

After Amarok, the best-designed is Songbird, whose Web structure gives it
an instant familiarity. Songbird also features skins, called feathers,
and a zoom for changing the size at which information is displayed,
but these features, although novel and convenient, are not enough to
challenge Amarok seriously.

Comment viewing options

I'm a simple user, with simple needs. Just need an easy to use media player to play my mp3/wma files. I tried to use Amarok lots of times, but beside it makes me remember the stupid itunes, is also a very annoying. Only Audacious allows me to select a folder o more, put them on a playlist and press play button, after that I minimize the frontend, so why loose resources or time with visual stuffs?
I think you should also analyze and compare this players tested with Audacious.